The following observations are of course my personal view and do not claim to be the “truth”!
Here comes Hou Yingchao (China):
Great comeback 2019!
Banana-Defending and Banana-Topspins:
Strengths:
- Very good footwork
- Good unorthodox defending on backhand and forehand
- Good forehand topspin against pushes
- Since he is using short pips to chop he can put either put a lot of backspin, sidespin or deceptive float on the ball which makes it more difficult to read the spin for the opponent.
- An astonishing often flabbergasting weapon is his forehand counter topspin with loads of sidespin making it nearly impossible for the opponent to counterspin it back as you can see in this first video when he plays Christian Süss.
- Uses the shot pips on the backhand occasionally to smash high pushes or block topspins down the line.
Weaknesses:
- Serve range could be wider
- sometimes a bit untempered and such putting him self off in tight match situations
- occasionally returning fast topspins into his backhand to high against the better Chinese players.
- often goes back into defending to early and to far away from the table thus opening up chances for the attacker to use wide angles with the topspins.
Suggestions:
- should get a wider range of serves
- Should try to attack more often with his forehand close to the table.
tabletennisdefenders 